Time to bang the gong again, we’ve got a new MoverWebsites.com customer live! If you need Huntsville Al Movers or Fayetteville TN Movers, then head on over to GeneralMovingServices.com. General Moving Services serves the Huntsville Alabama and Fayetteville Tennessee areas.
Like all of our moving sites, visitors can get an instant online estimate without having to give up personal information. We think that’s a pretty cool feature, hopefully it’s one that drives more business.
I am playing around with a new site that helps people find horses for sale, aptly named www.FindHorsesForSale.net. I wanted to provide searchers some background on the particular horse breed they were looking at, so I decided to provide the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia page for that horse breed, and then link off to the full wikipedia page. For example, see the content on the lower left of the paso fino horses for sale page.
After some searching around, I found the perfect tool – the wikipedia-client gem on github. As Judge Smails from Caddy Shack would say, “top notch, top notch!”
Here’s some quick code:
page = Wikipedia.find(horse_page_name)
I stumbled across this today after hacking around for hours trying to figure out import hundreds of thousands of records into a sqlite database in minutes – https://github.com/zdennis/activerecord-import. Super simple, and pure awesome. Works for sqlite, postgres, and mysql.
Been hacking away the last couple weeks building an online price comparison search for moving box kits. Check it out at www.MovingBoxSearch.com, the design has a ways to go, and we still have to add a bunch of providers, but it’s getting there.
We did manage to do one neat thing, we’ll buy $5 worth of Starbucks coffee for anyone who buys moving boxes through us. Within an hour or two of buying his/her boxes, the person will get an e-giftcard in their email inbox from Starbucks for $5. Who couldn’t use a little coffee on their move day?
What do you get when you mix Twilio‘s awesome telephony API, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce on demand, and Recurly‘s dead simple subscription billing API? A killer American accent training service – AccentTraining.net! Here’s how it works:
Example accent rating, with recordings
Example accent rating transcription
Why start such a service? Simple. I am a huge geek, and wanted to see if it could be done. Ok, that’s not the real reason, but I did enjoy the challenge.
The real reason arose when a good friend, who grew up in India, and I were talking about business ideas awhile back. He wanted to a startup to help Indian students get accepted to US colleges, and the conversation meandered into a discussion of how poor many students’ American accents were. Fresh off of building a website usability testing service based on Mechanical Turk (EasyUsability.com), the thought popped in my head that an accent rating and training service was a perfect use of the turk. Who better than everyday American residents to help people with their American accents?
Now you’re probably muttering to yourself, “that’s mildly interesting, but who’s going to pay money for this?” Great question. I am not exactly sure yet, but here are my initial thoughts:
So who knows where it will go from here, but we’ll see. Stay tuned for more posts on how things go!
HomeFinder.com (my day job), is hiring a couple software developers, a QA manager, and an Agile Technical Analyst. It’s a great place to work, right in downtown Chicago, full of fun, bright people. Developers get to use the latest and greatest web app technology (jquery, javascript, rest, mongodb, solr, php, etc.), get to do 3 day hackathons every month, and get to build and ship cool stuff. Check out the links below..
QA Manager:
As I talk to our small business customers and I prospect countless websites, I have noticed how little these businesses are doing to market and grow their businesses online.
The following is a quick list of easy things every small business can do across industries. I have left paid marketing off the list in order to focus on things every small business can do regardless of budget.
Build an SEO friendly website that fits your brand
Your website reflects your brand and your business. When someone comes to your site, they are making a first impression. You want your professionalism to show in the design, rich content, useful tools, and clear contact information. Don’t forget an email address in the contact information. I digress, but it is my pet peeve when I cannot contact a business via email. I usually only have time to work through my “to do” list at night.
Make sure your site is SEO friendly. Don’t hire a spammy SEO firm that will charge you a lot of money, promise first page placement, and just throw a bunch of links into your footer. The search engines may like you at first, but they are quick to scold when the SEO tactics are not to their liking. This is a post for another day.
There is nothing like free traffic! In the moving industry, there are thousands of searches for moving companies in every city a month. If you are not showing up in searches relevant to your business, you are missing out.
I recommend a couple of ways to get both of the above:
Register for the local directories
It is not only important for customer perception, but it also helps SEO when you are registered with all the local directories. Enter your business’s information into http://getlisted.org/. This will tell you where/how you are listed in the various directories/search engines.
Market yourself or your business
You are the expert in what you do. Sign up for www.HelpAReporter.com. You get an email twice a day asking for experts across every industry and expertise imaginable. This is a great way to get yourself published and to promote your business.
Social Media /Networking Sites
As a small business, you may have mixed result in your social media campaigns and marketing. It cannot hurt to create accounts on the sites below and to use them as appropriate to your business. Activity on these sites is also really good for SEO.
Don’t go overboard worrying about Tweeting or constantly updating Facebook. Just be yourself.
Participate in trade specific organizations
In each industry, there are professional organizations to get involved in at the local level. This is a great way to network with other professionals and share ideas on how they are doing business.
